Ed Roberson, after thanking his publishers at Nion Editions (Jane Gregory, Lyn Hejinan, and Claire-Marie Stancek), reads from “Twenty Aquarium Works,” from his book Aquarium Works, based on his time working as a tankman at the Pittsburgh Zoo and touching upon topics such as captivity, freedom, labor, caregiving, and ontological questions concerning nature and human relationships with animals. Roberson interweaves recollections, commentary, and stories of his time as a tankman in “When the shipment from the Amazon arrived...” and “When the herp and ich society met…” He reads “(Confession): In the city where the penguins are the prized mascot…”, “On my sneak time I’d hat up to the cat mouse,” “(Charged) like seeing you standing up to your ankles,” “Moray eels cannot chew,” and “(Martha Graham turn) The visitors don’t even notice the octopus….” He reads “Where the porpoises come from...”, mentioning Linda Rodriguez’s poem “Amazon River Dolphins,” which he also reads. He reads, “Somebody said someone had thrown something…”, “The institutional electrician was called in to fix the lighting...” and discusses “Esuf” or the abstract translation of the Arabic word for emptiness in “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B.”
Roberson transitions to poems from MPH, reflecting on his time traveling by motorcycle with two friends, Andrew Welsh, who would author The Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics, 1978, and a painter friend named Dick. He begins with, “For some, any journey is never anything but for freedom,” “As if I’ve seen enough…”, “beside two rivers just made one…” and “the first of those drawn lines you actually never see.” Roberson shifts to more recent poems in the same book, reading “'Cause when we made the middle passage," “By the edge of town north is the same as south,” and “The weather they get away in black limousine…”
He ends remarking that "sometimes it's too close," the private with the public, in the presentation of the work.